This invention is related in general to conferencing systems and more specifically to devices, systems, architectures, and methods of spanning a plurality of conferences.
In modern working life, it is typical to have conflicting meetings, such as two video or telephone conferences scheduled at overlapping times. In some cases, a person may only need passive participation in one or more of several meetings, while being able to actively participate in one meeting at a time. However, people can generally process multiple sets of information while focusing primary attention on only one thing at a time.
In some conventional approaches, audio-only or video-only monitoring of several locations can occur, but such monitoring is not done in a conferencing application. Accordingly, what is needed is a way of spanning a plurality of conferences by participating in some conferences in a passive manner and at least one in an active manner. In general, a person may need to be effectively present in more than one conference at the same time. In particular, a way of using different “modalities” or media modes of a conference to allow participation as well as to distinguish between multiple conferences using a given media mode is desirable.